The use of games and/or sports as a nationalistic tool is an interesting topic.  While it is hard to think of a sport that the United States uses to portray national prowess to other nations, excluding the Olympics of course, sports do fit nicely into nationalistic impulses.  While all of the readings for this weeks in some way or another discuss the use of physical supremacy in sports as a way of developing nationalism, I felt that Morris in his essay entitled “Marrow of the Nation” brought a particularly interesting point into the argument. He discusses martial arts and its resurrection from obscurity in China during the Republican-era.  In his discussion he outlines the way in which the government promoted the “national” (martial) arts to help counteract the international stereotype of the sick Asian body.  Brownell describes it as, “the main motivation behind the campaign for public health was an obsession with erasing the label of “Sick Man of East Asia” that, it was believed, was applied by Japan and the West to the Chinese body” (p. 58). The problem with making the martial arts a universal Chinese symbol of strength and power, was that the art prior to the early twentieth century was still heavily based in oral tradition.  The argument against martial arts and its spread was that it was not based in science, or in other words, it was not based in written code.  How could something become a source of national pride when so many variations existed?  The way this issue really manifested was how to create a systematic rule system in order to determine a winner and a loser, a concept championed by the Western sports popular in China at this time.  The drive to codify martial arts was not only to create unification nationally, but more importantly to show the world what China was capable of. Morris quotes Chu Minyi, a Republican-era government official, as stating, “Then we can give this organized, systematized, scholarly, and methodological guoshu to all the people of the world … Spreading Chinese guoshu to the entire world will mean glad tidings for humanity” (p. 20). Martial arts was an opportunity for a very unique Chinese practice to permeate the world.  A systematic approach to martial arts had to be created in order for the Western world to accept, and embrace the sport.  What is interesting is that they were taking an art that was distinctly Chinese, and adding confines to facilitate the worldwide permeation of the sport.  Competitive sports were central to Western culture, so martial arts must also embody the characteristics of a competitive sport, if it too would rise to global prominence.  Morris quotes Warlord Feng Yuxiang in 1927 as saying, “Now it is all just about blindly following the West, … and when you think about it this is really our greatest shame.  The Republican-era was doing its best to reject cultural borrowing, and yet it became a necessity to be present on the world stage.